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Census Power Is Returned To Secretary Of Commerce

The Bush administration today transferred the power to adjust population figures produced by the 2000 Census to the secretary of commerce from the Census Bureau, setting up what was bound to be an intense legal and political fight.

The Commerce Department rescinded a regulation issued in October by the Clinton administration that had sought to insulate from political pressure any decision on whether to adjust census figures.

Donald L. Evans, the secretary of commerce, said bureaucrats at the Census Bureau should not make a decision that partisans on both sides contended could be crucial in determining what party would control the House after the 2002 election. That decision, Mr. Evans said, should be made by politicians, who ultimately had to face voters.

''Accountability is the cornerstone of America's participatory democracy,'' Mr. Evans said. ''Our leaders must be accountable to the people. I believe the decision-making authority for the 2000 census should reside with a person selected by the president, approved by the U.S. Senate and accountable to the people.''

Mr. Evans, who was President Bush's campaign chairman, changed the rules less than two weeks before a panel of experts at the Census Bureau was scheduled to recommend whether the census should be adjusted to account for people who were missed and people who were counted twice by traditional census-taking methods. The panel is studying the results of the census and comparing them to data derived from a sample of 314,000 of the 120 million American households.

The committee has determined that the 2000 census missed 0.96 percent to 1.4 percent of the country's population.

Under the Clinton regulation that Mr. Evans rescinded, the head of the Census Bureau -- an acting director who is a career civil servant -- would have had to make a decision whether to adjust the population counts within five days of receiving the committee's recommendation.

Jim Dyke, a spokesman for the Commerce Department, said the committee would still make its recommendation, which would be made public. But, unlike the report the committee would have produced under the Clinton rule, the adjusted and unadjusted population numbers would not be disclosed. And, Mr. Dyke said, Mr. Evans, would have the final say on whether the population counts would be altered.

''All this does is take the final decision-making authority for the 2000 census from the director of the census and put it back with the secretary of commerce where it resided until the prior administration placed it with the director of the census, who, at the time, was a political appointee,'' Mr. Dyke said.

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Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat from Manhattan, said, ''Mr. Bush is really prioritizing politics over people by installing his campaign manager in the position of making the decision which should be made by the professionals.''

Brian Komar, a policy associate for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said, ''If the secretary of commerce were to utilize his new authority to overrule the career professionals at the Census Bureau it would be a triumph of politics over fairness.''

The fight over whether to adjust the census has been a partisan imbroglio that has lasted for more than a decade. Because minorities tend to be missed and whites are often counted more than once, civil rights organizations and big-city mayors contend that minority areas are often short-changed when it comes to receiving federal and state financing based on population.

And political strategists say that not adjusting the census count places Democrats at a disadvantage when it comes to drawing Congressional districts, which are based on population. With the Republicans holding a razor-thin majority in the House, how the Congressional districts are drawn may be crucial to who will be in power after the 2002 elections.

After the 1990 census, Robert A. Mosbacher, the commerce secretary in the administration of President Bush's father, declined to adjust the census to account for the 8.4 million people who were missed and the 4.4 million who were counted twice. That decision prompted a number of lawsuits, including one by New York City. In 1996, the Supreme Court ruled that the decision not to adjust the census count was within the discretion of the commerce secretary.

Los Angeles officials said they were considering a lawsuit in response to today's action. Such a suit would charge that the administration violated federal law by not allowing the minimum 30-day comment period before significantly altering a federal regulation.

But, in its order, the administration declared that no comment period was necessary since the change it was making in the regulation was not ''substantive.''